Riga to commemorate victims of Chernobyl disaster

Кадр: youtube.com.

Next week there will be a special event organized at P.Stradins Clinical University Hospital to commemorate the victims of Chernobyl disaster, as reported by chairman of Latvian Union Chernobyl Arnolds Arvaldis Verzemnieks.

26 April 2017 marks 31 years since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine. The annual commemorative event will take place in Riga at 10:00 at P.Stradins Clinical University Hospital.

Verzemnieks reminds that more than six thousand Latvian residents took part in clean-up work in Chernobyl after the disaster. Radiation has impacted the health of those people so much that more than three thousands of them have become invalids, more than 1,500 have died and all others have lost the ability to work. The first clean-up crew set out for Chernobyl on 8 May 1986.

The commemorative plate for victims of Chernobyl disaster was opened at Stradins Hospital on 8 May 2002.

«A catastrophe of such a scale is impossible to forget. People from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and other countries – around eight hundred thousand in total – took part in the clean-up work after the disaster. Baltic States provided twenty thousand people, including more than six thousand from Latvia. According to information from the World Health Organization, five million people still live in territories with high radiation pollution,» Verzemnieks.

Representatives of state and municipal institutions, ambassadors of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Japan and other countries have been invited to attend this event. Participants of the clean-up operation in Chernobyl will participate in the event as well.